unphoneable

For at least the foreseeable future—for the rest of today and possibly longer—I cannot receive phone calls or text messages.

This is due to a glitch in transferring my mobile service from one carrier to another, one is that totally my fault because I’d made the assumption that my non-branded phone which I’d bought outright more than two years ago was already unlocked. Silly me. Now I get to wait for emailed instructions from the manufacturer on how to complete this process myself, and in the meantime my fancy phone has become something more along the lines of an iPod Touch.

You’d think being without phone service for 24 hours or longer would be a major inconvenience, or at least a source of great frustration. But actually, other than not receiving texted holiday photos of my nieces and nephews for the space of one day, it’s not that bad. I can still get email. I can still listen to audiobooks on my neighborhood hikes. I can still (I think) use GPS if I get lost. I can connect to WiFi to check on the weather forecast or look up whatever piece of trivia has caught my interest. I can do just about everything I’d been doing before, except calling or texting people.

But do you know how often I was making or receiving calls? Neither do I. Maybe a couple of calls each week. It’s been a pretty low number for a good while. When I did need to call customer service last night to initiate the help process, I just used Skype.

So as I sit and go about my normal day while hardly noticing the absence of phone service, I’m not considering ditching the phone entirely. Instead, I’m thinking about something that Jamie Todd Rubin did a couple of years ago: He retired his voice mail.

Personally, I don’t like answering the phone. Calls almost always come in when I’m immersed in something else that I can’t immediately break away from—like writing or editing. The niceties involved in real-time telephone exchanges eat up productive time for everybody, and conversations have a way of getting out of hand and prolonging themselves. That’s not to say that I don’t like people; instead, I have to be protective of the hours when I’m feeling well enough to work, and phone calls invariably come in during workdays. I have a strong preference for email or even text messaging over phone calls—it’s easier and faster to get to the point, and both sender and receiver can attend to them as schedules allow without interruptions. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer. Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert. Perhaps it’s both of these things and more. But I generally don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize, for a variety of reasons. Plus, we have long had such bad phone reception inside the house that I have to march around the first floor looking for a decent spot in which to have a conversation—or the phone won’t even ring but I’ll be surprised by an unexpected voice mail notification.

(This last is a big reason I’m switching carriers after 12 years with the same provider.)

While the idea of retiring voice mail definitely appeals to me, I’m not sure it would work so well in my case just yet. I still do receive a fair number of calls from elderly and senior interview sources and from others who aren’t necessarily as comfortable with email as they are with telephones. I am pretty bad about checking my voice message, though, and I’m afraid this is probably only going to get worse.

But we’ll see. For the time being, I don’t even have phone service. I might just get used to that.

Creative Commons photo: Red phone box in London by Jamie McCaffrey.